How do you review a work that resists being ‘understood’, at least in any rational sense? This is the question I ask myself when faced with Murray Edmond’s prose poem ‘Nice Hollow You’ve Got’. Perhaps the best way is to appreciate it as you would a piece of music, to enjoy this prose poem as if it were a sonata, to let the words wash over you, to comprehend it as a strange new expression of reality far removed from the instructions, for example, of how to assemble a compost bin. This is poetry meets quantum physics where a world of random probability, words and phrases, take on meanings far beyond any quotidian sense we are likely to associate with them. I guess none of this is new. Rimbaud spoke of the need for a ‘systematic disordering of the senses’ over a century and a half ago. And in the late 1960s Murray was a leading light in the groundbreaking literary magazine Freed whose manifesto proclaimed freedom from stale and outmoded literary conventions. Murray is a poet with a fine comprehension of Pound’s dictum ‘make it new’ and his work continues to present images from the cutting edge of a talent in which language is constantly reinvigorated.

A white page. Or is it a polar ice cap? What if it melts? Will the sea levels rise? What carbons will be released into the atmosphere? Where does the poem come from… where is it going… a polar bear trudges into a midnight sun… entering the eye… remember…

bob orr